Mort, my take on selective breeding is that an outsider is manipulating the gene. Natural selection (that has been going on as long as there has been life on this planet) is not what I define as selective breeding. Tomato, tomato!

gotcha. I'll give you that. selective breeding has only been going on with humans for a couple hundred thousand years. But in a very real way all evolution is selective breeding. Either selection by the females for attractivness or fitness, selection by predator for speed or allusiveness, selection by co-species for sugar production, color, aroma... Michael Pollen's book 'The Botony of Desire' goes into the idea of evolution as selective breeding in a really interesting way.

All that being said, and I don't think I touched on this in my original post in this thread, I don't have any particular problem with sequencing genomes. It can't hurt to have more knowledge about our important crops I just worry about what is done with that knowledge in partial ignorance of the system in which it exists.